The 28 is the working working gun. The 27s back in the day were probably the premier .357. Fit and finish was just excellent. General Patton carried a custom 27, with the 3.5" barrel. The 27 had a lot of options, the 28 came in 4" or 6".

Probably the only other S&W that came even close to the 27 in finish was the original mod. 29s. There is a caveat here, the first .357s were not 27s, their model designation was "registered something", the 27s came along later. Those first S&W .357 guns were all hand fitted, and came with "papers"..

I have my Dad's old 29, it has a four digit serial number. I am not sure when he got it, but my brother was still in Korea then.

Wow! Some mighty mouth watering pictures showing up here!
My M28 has nearly 200 rounds through it and it's every bit as accurate as I hoped for. The gentleman I got it from also has a pristine M27 and a .38/44....but is not ready to part with them yet.

Randy

__________________Unless you're the lead sled dog the scenery never changes.

The factory .38-44 loading originally was with a 158 gr, bullet loaded to just over 1100 fps.

By the end of the run the ammunition companies had reduced those to around 1050. Those old N frame guns were heavy for the .357 magnum loads by todays standards. The SAMMI upper pressure limit is listed at 35K. I found an article written by some one who had some of the original factory .357 ammunition, they sent it off to a lab for pressure testing. Some of it went as high as 46K.

I have one box left of some of the earlier .357 Mag. loads before they
were reduced by SAAMI. They're Winchester brand and when I got
them, a guy had them at the range and was going to throw it and the
box he had left into the brass bucket. I asked if I could have them to
break them sown for the brass and he said OK. I got a box and a half
of that ammo. When I looked at them and ran my fingernail over one of
the bullets I realized what they were. When I got home, I pulled a few
bullets and the charge was 15.5 gr. +/-.1gr. of what looked like 2400
powder. My guess is a canister version of 2400 for the .357. I know that
early ammo was noted for leading barrels badly and these were no
exception. The half box I shot up and the full box is in my collection.
FWIW, it took a while to scrub the lead out of the barrel of my M28.
I can remember when the max load for the .357 Mag. was 15.0 gr. of
H2400, the H standing for Hercules who made the powder back then.
Of course A2400 is for the current Alliant version which to me seems to
be a hair faster burning. I could be wrong but it's my gut feeling on the
subject and I trust my gut feelings. They've saved my bacon more than
once.
Paul B.

When I started as a Trooper in Alaska, we were issued mod 19 S&Ws, our ammunition was the Winchester Super X plated lead bullets, they were "HOT", you really knew you were shooting something out of those "K" frame guns.

The reason that the early .357 magnum loads were so effective is that with the high velocity and relatively soft bullets they worked great on game. If you shot very many of them at one time there was some pretty substantial leading.

The trade off in switching from black powder to smokeless was that soft bullets would have their rifling stripped off and cause serious leading. As a result the harder bullets didn't expand as well so the velocity was increased even more, which required even harder bullets and they were no better. Then the ammo makers pushed jacketed soft point bullets and then jacketed hollow points, which often fail to expand.

Interesting as I had a lot of leading issues in my Colt trouper MK III from the first soft lead bullets I shot in the new gun in the early 70"s A friend pointed out the leading and said I should shoot steel jacketed at the end of the session. I tried that and it worked so well cleaning the gun right out. I only shoot JHP now!! Craig

__________________Wall Street reports today on brisk trading 380 brass finished higher for the last 14 straight months against the euro, dollar and yen.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot create polls in this forumYou can vote in polls in this forum